


epistofi

by maidsolidor



Category: Granblue Fantasy (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:21:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27457903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maidsolidor/pseuds/maidsolidor
Summary: Cagliostro brings Lucifer back to life, just in time for Sariel to start hunting for the rainbow in earnest.The life of a skyfarer is never easy.
Relationships: Lucifer/Sandalphon (Granblue Fantasy)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	epistofi

In a place beyond the sky…

“Look at this, Shalem. Whatever should we do with it?”

“Is that… you didn’t retrieve it, did you? Even for you that’s going too far.”

“Worry not. It fell through a gate of its own volition. I was thinking of returning it.”

“Thinking or planning? For an observer, you’re pretty meddlesome.”

“Haha. Thank you.”

\----

Djeeta was three bolts deep in golem repair when she found herself distracted by a tiny face popping up over the countertop.

“Djeeta? Are you busy?”

She was busy. She’d been busy for the last several hours and, at this point, had become so blocked in her workflow that she’d thought about the merits of booting the little toy right over the Grandcypher’s bow. Usually she found modifying golems to be a relaxing hobby; there was a soothing rhythm to machines, more subdued than people and less chaotic than nature. It was a nice counterweight to the insanity that infected the life of a skyfarer.

Lyria waited a polite amount of time for Djeeta’s answering grunt before weaving her way around the workshop counter and letting a strange object roll out of her hand and across its surface. “I found this by my bedside this morning. Do you know what it is?”

Djeeta watched it move. It rolled as if a sphere, but didn’t gather enough kinetic energy to be properly round. Whenever she tried to consider it closer it felt like looking at a heat haze. Her vision couldn’t properly grasp the shape or size of it. She blinked, squinted her eyes, and then blinked again. Somehow, it felt like her attempts at comprehending the thing was causing it personal offense. “No clue,” she said, and laid back in her chair with a sigh. “Do you know what it is?”

“No.” Lyria watched it, too, but didn’t seem to be having the same problems as Djeeta. “But I get a familiar sense from it. It’s hard to describe, but… it reminds me of…” She hesitated. 

“Of?” Djeeta prompted.

“...Of Lucifer’s plume. It has the same energy. At least, that’s what I think. It’s stronger, though,” Lyria nodded as she spoke. 

Djeeta frowned. She remembered Lucifer (and the debacle that came with him). She supposed that, to be fair to him, it was really his… Protege? Progeny? Significant other? A certain other primarch who’d been predominantly at fault, but things had come back around to Lucifer in the end. His life- and death- had been the catalyst of numerous calamities the man himself would have loathed to be responsible for. That was the sense she’d gotten from their brief interaction. Djeeta rarely thought of him and certainly wasn’t familiar enough with him or his power to draw a conclusion on whether Lyria’s mysterious item had anything to do with the departed angel. All had been quiet on the Primarch front for a while, now; the most she’d dealt with them over the last year was the occasional visit to Sandalphon’s cafe to beg for that most life-giving of elixirs, coffee. That suited her just fine. It wasn’t that she hated the primarchs- in fact, she was fond of most of them. It was just that Djeeta’s life was overflowing with problems on the best of days, and one less thing to worry about in the skies was peachy with her. “What are you saying?” she finally asked. 

“I’m not really sure,” Lyria said. “But I think… this might have something to do with him. No, it definitely has something to do with him. Maybe we could ask someone? What about Lucio or Sandalphon?”

“Lucio’s off doing whatever it is he does,” Djeeta replied. “Which is to say I have no idea. Sandalphon has been gone a few days. He said he had something to look into, a rainbow, whatever that means.”

Lyria made a quiet “oh” sound. 

“We could wait?” Djeeta offered. “I don’t know when he’ll return.”

Lyria picked up her prize and clasped it in her tiny hands. She stared at it for a long moment before saying, “I think we’re supposed to do something with it now.”

“It’s not talking to you, is it?” Djeeta hoped she didn’t sound as alarmed as she felt.

Lyria shook her head. “It’s nothing like that. But I did have a dream last night, before I woke up and found this. A man with long hair, who looked like Lucio and Lucifer… he said, ‘This belongs here, with you. He deserves it.’ Do you think ‘he’ means ‘Lucifer’?”

Djeeta resisted the urge to clutch her forehead against the headache that was growing there. It had been a nice, disaster-free week. One would think she’d learned her lesson about disaster-free weeks. They were a luxury for a reason. She gave herself a moment to collect her captainly authority before saying, “If you think we need to figure it out now, we’ll do it now. It’s probably something the Astrals created, right? Who do we know that can create things on par with the Astrals?”

An explosion sounded off from the depths of the ship right on cue.

\----

Clarisse opened the door to Cagliostro’s lab with one singed eyebrow and a grin a mile wide. “Oh, hello, Captain. Lyria,” she said, and gave a valiant effort at looking somewhat less pleased with herself. “Is this about the explosion? It’s fine, I have it under control.”

Clarisse’s ‘under control’ could be charitably described as funneling a tempest. Djeeta was surprised that she’d made it to the lab before Rackam; the last time something had detonated below deck, he’d taken off so fast the floor had caught fire in his wake. All the better, though- she wasn’t sure she wanted to have this discussion in front of the crew, whatever “this discussion” wound up being. “It’s fine,” she said, and gave a strained smile. “Is Cagliostro here? Can we talk to her?”

Clarisse yelled “MASTER CAGS!” and retreated back to her workshop corner. 

It didn’t take long for Cagliostro to make her way over. She all but bounced on her small feet, little adornments swinging merrily from her dress. Sometimes Djeeta forgot that Cags was anything but the cute girl she appeared to be (luckily, Cags was always happy to remind her). “She really does have that under control,” Cagliostro says, and makes a flippant gesture towards her apprentice. “What do you need?”

In lieu of speaking, Lyria held out her hand and opened her tightly-clenched fist. Cagliostro picked up the thing infused with Lucifer’s power as it threatened to roll free and held it up to the light, squinting much like Djeeta had. She turned it this way and that, inspecting it closely, and then her eyebrows raised just enough that Djeeta suspected she was actually far more shocked than she appeared.

“Do you know what it is?” Lyria asked, hopefully.

Cags smirked. “I’ve got an idea,” she said. “How’d you get this?”

Djeeta interrupted before Lyria could explain and said, “I’m pretty sure a certain meddling guy left it for her. It’s something to do with Lucifer, right?”

“Lucifer? Maybe,” Cags says, looking at it again. “But this is definitely a primarch’s core.”

Djeeta and Lyria’s twin gasps were so loud even Clarisse looked up in surprise from her dangerously-explosive project. They immediately glanced at each other and started stumbling over each other with a barrage of questions.

“A core-

“Is it Lucifer’s core-”

“How? I thought Lucilius took his body-”

“How did it get out of the rift?”

Cagliostro clapped her hands to grab back the two’s attention. “Those are all fantastic questions, and I don’t have the answer to any of them- Except that second one, maybe. Lyria, what do you sense from this core?”

Lyria took a breath and closed her eyes. Djeeta watched her intently; primarchs and primals were not so different, and watching Lyria channel a primal’s power was always a delight. After a moment, her eyes opened and met Djeeta’s for the briefest of seconds. “It’s not the power of the Supreme Primarch,” she said, “it’s something… softer. Gentler. Like maybe this is what Lucifer was underneath.”

Cag nodded while Lyria spoke. “That would make sense, if this is his core. As we’ve seen, the power of the Supreme Primarch wasn’t exclusive to Lucifer.”

“Right,” Djeeta said. “It was more like an AI chip, able to be traded between shells as needed.”

If Cagliostro was amused by her mechanical-minded comparison, it was hard to tell beneath her regular levels of amusement. “So it was. That said, I think it’d be a mistake to assume that being the Supreme Primarch had nothing to do with the makeup of this.” She turned Lucifer’s core this way and that, eyeing the way it shimmered in the light like a mirage. “I can’t wait to study it.”

Lyria looked shocked and yelped, “Study?!”

Cag shrugged noncommittally. “That’s why you brought it to me, right? I never threw out those notes I got from the research lab back when the world was ending. I wouldn’t mind making some additions myself- unless you had another idea about what to do with the core?” She grinned. It wasn’t a nice, relaxing sort of grin; looking at it made Djeeta think of a wildcat eyeing a bird in a cage. Personally, Djeeta hadn’t had any “other ideas” about what to do with the thing-that-was-a-core, but Cagliostro had good intuition and she was staring at Lyria expectantly.

Lyria hesitated before lowering her eyes to the floor. “Well, I-I didn’t really, but when you said it was a core, I thought- you know, I thought maybe-”

“Spit it out!”

“I thought maybeyoucouldrebuildhim!” Lyria said all at once, eyes bright and shining like the moon as she looked hopefully at Cag. “You know how to make bodies better than anyone else with alchemy, and the reason you couldn’t before was because without his core he wouldn’t have a soul, right? So now we have the core, and nothing bad is happening, and I just think it would be nice. I mean, doesn’t he deserve it after everything? I don’t think his life should have ended like… like it did.” She clutches the hem of her dress in both hands and bites miserably at her lip. “And it would make Sandalphon really happy, so… please?”

“Aw, how sweet.” The words didn’t fit with the smirk still curling at the edges of Cagliostro’s mouth. “Isn’t she sweet, Djeeta?”

“Very sweet,” Djeeta said. Lyria turned red.

Cag continued holding the core up to the light as she began to pace back and forth, little shoes click-clacking on the laboratory floor. “So you want me to rebuild the former Supreme Primarch from half-scribbled notes and memory alone, out of whatever scraps I have laying around. Is that right?”

“Well…” Lyria blinked. “Yes.”

“Hopefully less scraps,” Djeeta interjected. She hadn’t intended to get involved, but now that some kind of plan seemed to be forming she couldn’t keep her mouth shut. “If you need resources, we can get them for you. We always do.” Lyria smiled at her gratefully.

“Fine, not scraps. Out of the finest alchemical ingredients in the skies.” Djeeta didn’t like how gleefully Cag said that, even if it was punctuated with a sigh. “Honestly,” Cag complained, stopping with her back to them so that all Djeeta and Lyria could see of her was long blonde hair and the backs of her legs. “I’m not some miracle-worker you can just whip up on demand, you know!”

Lyria glanced quickly to Djeeta. “I know! Really, I only just thought about it, but it seems like the right thing to do, so- I mean, if you can’t do it…”

Cagliostro’s hair swayed forward as she heaved the most enormous sigh. “Yes. I can’t do it. The creations of the Astrals are just too much for me. I’ve finally found my limit.”

“I- wait, really?”

“Of course not!” Cag spun around, a huge grin cracked across her face. “It’s like asking a famous painter to sketch a child’s drawing! Even that Lucilius wouldn’t stand a chance in the end.” She closed her fist around Lucifer’s core and punched it toward the sky. “How dare you doubt me? I’ll give you your angel, Captain! And he will be adorable.”

Cagliostro’s thunderous laughter echoed through the lab. Djeeta felt the headache coming back.

\----

“I convinced her to stick as closely to the original design as possible. She’s not going to make him three feet smaller and female… I think,” Djeeta said as she looked at the rest of her main crew. She and Lyria had felt it was prudent to warn them about their hastily-made plans for Lucifer’s resurrection.

Djeeta looked around at the rest of the table and tried to look more confident than she felt. It wasn’t that she thought she made the wrong decision, but even the right decision felt awkward when you had to justify it to your peers. She swallowed once to steel herself before carrying on. “Cagliostro will build the new body over the next few weeks. We’ll be responsible for bringing her what she asks for, whatever that is. We decided not to inform the primarchs until we’re sure it’s going to work. I don’t want to give anyone false hope, especially not Sandalphon. I think he’s- well, he’s been through enough.” 

Rosetta nodded from the corner of the table. “I think that’s a good decision. I have the utmost faith in our dear alchemist, but there’s no need to get ahead of ourselves.”

“Any more than we already have,” Rackam muttered.

Djeeta chose to ignore him. He’d been in a bad mood since he learned that Clarisse’s experiments had somehow expanded the part of the Grandcypher their alchemists were allotted by at least half. Expanded was, of course, a generous term. She highly doubted Clarisse and Cagliostro intended to work in a burnt-out hole.

Io raised her hand and Djeeta nodded at her to go ahead. “Is there any way we can help?”

“I already asked, but you can go ahead and offer yourself,” Djeeta said. “Maybe she’ll take it better from you. I’m just a mechanic.” She shrugged. It hadn’t offended her when Cags had laughed right in her face at the offer of assistance; she wasn’t even the best mechanic on the ship, let alone being any good with magic. “Speaking of which, Rackam, weren’t we going to meet up with Noa soon? I know you were talking about maintenance the other day.” That perked him up, and soon they were chatting about ship repairs and other mundane duties. 

Lyria and Vyrm were on check-in duty for the coming weeks. Since it was Lyria’s idea, it was only fitting that she was the one who went to Cagliostro for status reports. Djeeta, for her part, spent more time than she’d like scanning the sky for a familiar pair of russet wings returning to roost. She had no idea what she was going to say to him to explain the situation. “Hey, don’t freak out, but Lyria got Lucifer’s core in a dream and roped Cagliostro into reviving him”? “Sure,” she muttered to herself, “that explains the gist of the situation, but it isn’t very clever.”

Something landed on the deck next to her with a thud. “That’s not surprising. You’re not the best at cleverness.”

Djeeta bit clean through her tongue to hold back her yelp. “Sandalphon,” she muttered, little flecks of blood spitting through her teeth. She turned to look at him and said, “Would it kill you to give a girl some warning?”

“Maybe.” Sandalphon smirked at her. Honestly, Djeeta rather liked his rough-edged personality even if he could be a little shit. She wasn’t exactly shiny-smooth herself and sometimes she just needed someone to snipe with. Lyria was a darling girl and a sweetheart, but being rude to her was borderline impossible.

It was for that reason she followed up with, “Well, we can’t have that. You’re our only barista. Speaking of, you better not have vanished just to go get some coffee beans or something.” 

Djeeta leaned back against the deck railing and motioned for him to explain. She could see a line of tension string itself through his shoulders before it dispersed, and he took a breath. “Unfortunately not. I told you about Sariel, yes?” he asked.

Sariel. Sariel… right. One of the primarchs. She had a hazy image of a pale man with long, black hair and strangely gentle eyes. “Think so,” Djeeta said. “He was Belial’s friend, right? And took it hard when he, uh, vanished.”

“That’s one way of putting it,” Sandalphon muttered. “But you’re mostly right. I told you he was looking for him, right? Wanted to see him again. Well, he might have found a way.”

Djeeta stared at him.

“I don’t know for sure,” he said quickly. “But there’ve been reports of weird rifts popping up. Halluel stopped by the other week and mentioned it. I thought I should go and investigate.” Sandalphon stood a little straighter as he explained. Djeeta heard the unspoken “because I’m the Supreme Primarch” added on to the end, and she couldn’t help but feel the slightest bit proud. It was almost heartwarming to see how well he’d taken to the role- too heartwarming, actually, and she covered it up by poking him in the breastplate.

“Took you long enough. What did you find? Is it time for the apocalypse again?”

“Probably not,” Sandalphon sniffed. “None of the rifts I found were big enough for anything to come through. It’s enough to make me think it might be time to start searching for Sariel in earnest, though. I don’t like this.” He mirrored her posture against the deck rail and folded his arm, scowling at nothing in particular along the wooden floorboards.

“Agreed.” Djeeta rolled her head back to stare at the clouds above. “Maybe it’s a good thing Lucifer might be back soon.”

“What.”

“...Oh, shit.”

Sandalphon didn’t have any power over the temperature- at least as far as she knew- but it still felt like the air chilled significantly as he stared at her. She tilted her head back down to catch his gaze and called up a bit more of that captain’s authority. “You heard what I said,” Djeeta said. “Lyria found his core. Don’t ask how, I don’t know either. We gave it to Cagliostro to see if she could build a replacement body to put it in. I understand it’s going well.”

Sandalphon’s jaw worked like he was about to start yelling, but Djeeta held up a hand to stop him. “It might not even work, but Lyria thought it was worth a shot. We all did. I’ll accept ‘thank you’ and vague expressions of excitement, but if you throw me off something again I swear I’ll kill you no matter how many wings you have.”

Sandalphon kept staring at her. Djeeta stared back.

She couldn’t read the expression on his face. Part of it was hope, she thought; she saw it in his eyes, shining bright even as his mouth thinned into a line and his eyebrows pulled downward. There was definitely some outrage, and a lot of confusion. Djeeta told herself to give him time. It was a lot to take in, after all. She tried to imagine how she’d feel if Lyria died and then someone told her there’s a chance she might return, then drew on that sorrow to extend her patience. It wasn’t easy. The silence stretched on, and on, long enough that she was starting to think he’d died from shock.

Sandalphon’s mouth opened but no sound came out. It took a second before he managed to say, “Cagliostro? You gave him to Cagliostro?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Cagliostro.”

Now she was worried the news had broken him. “Yeah. You said that.”

Sandalphon curled his hands into fists balled-up in the fabric of his jacket. “I want to see what she’s done. Now.”

Djeeta counted to one, then to two, then reminded herself that she should cut him some slack. “Okaaaay,” she said, slowly. “But you’re going to sit and listen to whatever she tells you, and you’re not going to interrupt her. Can you promise me that?”

The old Sandalphon probably would have screamed at her. He might have pushed her aside and headed down to the lab himself, heedless of her warnings. Instead, he takes a deep breath and visibly steadies himself before nodding. Djeeta’s heart feels uncomfortably warm at the sight. “Alright,” she says. “Let’s go.” 

\----


End file.
